SOUTH BEND — An Indiana bishop is urging St. Mary’s College to “correct” a new admissions policy allowing men who identify as women to enroll at the all-female Catholic university.
The South Bend college’s non-discrimination policy was updated in June to say it will now consider undergraduate applicants whose “sex is female or who consistently live and identify as women.”
President Katie Conboy last week sent an email to faculty, staff and students saying the college is still determining the practices that will follow from the policy, according to The Observer, the college’s student newspaper. Admissions will begin considering transgender applicants in fall 2024.
Indiana Bishop Kevin Rhoades, whose diocese includes South Bend, on Monday pushed back against the change and said administrators never included or informed him of the matter.
In a statement, he urged St. Mary’s board of trustees “to correct its admissions policy in fidelity to the Catholic identity and mission” and to “reject ideologies of gender that contradict the authoritative teachings of the Catholic Church.”
“The desire of Saint Mary’s College to show hospitality to people who identify as transgender is not the problem,” Rhoades said. “The problem is a Catholic woman’s college embracing a definition of woman that is not Catholic.”
The new policy is an historic shift for the university, which was founded as a women’s college in 1844, but it isn’t the first single-sex Catholic school to accept transgender students.
The all-female College of Saint Benedict and the all-male Saint John’s University in Minnesota have accepted transgender and nonbinary students since 2016 and “support every student’s right to self-identification,” according to their websites.
What is new is a bishop speaking out against the policy. Rhoades appears to be the first diocesan bishop to respond publicly to transgender policies at Catholic women’s colleges, according to The Pillar, a Catholic media project.
Rhoades said admitting transgender students “suggests that the college affirms an ideology of gender that separates sex from gender and claims that sexual identity is based on the subjective experience of the individual.”
“This ideology is at odds with Catholic teaching,” he wrote in the statement.
Lisa Knox, a spokeswoman for St. Mary’s, said the decision was made because “in today’s environment, we needed to clarify our nondiscrimination policy to be more inclusive,” according to a statement issued this week to the Catholic News Agency.
The new policy comes now, she explained, due to changes in the College Board’s Common Application, an online form that prospective college students can fill out to apply to multiple institutions. That includes the ability for students to choose “F, M, or X” for one’s legal sex, Knox told CNA.
That created challenges for single-sex colleges “that are trying to be inclusive while maintaining their status as women’s or men’s institutions,” she said.
The new admissions policy comes as the Vatican grapples with how to deal with issues of gender and sexuality.
Pope Francis in a documentary released this year stated he knew and accepted nonbinary people into the church. That comes just four years after the Vatican released a document directed at Catholic schools stating that nonbinary gender identities were “fictitious” and a threat to the traditional family.
Most Catholics believe there are only two genders. A poll by the Public Religion Research Institute this year found 69% of white Catholics and 66% of Hispanic Catholics hold that view.
But Rev. Dennis Henry Holtschneider, the president of the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities, said last year that Catholic universities should welcome discussion of gender issues.
“To be a university for controversial questions requires a starting point that accepts complexity where it finds complexity, and resists simplification where that would be a lie,” he wrote in an op-ed piece. “It invites and listens deeply to the opposing idea.”
